The project goal from Service Canada was extremely vague. We were asked to propose a solution for ideation. Our team was not given any more detail, but there were a lot of technical requirements. In order to better understand the project’s goals, we had to work closely with the development team to try and puzzle together goals and requirements for this project.
Together with our development team, we came up with these 7 needs and features:
Our product owner confirmed the 7 needs and features with our Service Canada rep. Now that we had an idea of what our client was looking for, we needed to begin researching.
Our team organized informal interviews with our Service Canada rep and various people involved with discovery within our organization. Pretty quickly, we discovered a common theme. People get frustrated by organization in their day-to-day ideation.
Some of the people we asked felt they would “get lost in their docs” after a focused work session. Here are some examples of complaints:
This demonstrated a breakdown in workflow for the tools our people were using for their ideation. Next we looked into tools commonly used for ideation:
With the exception of Notion, one file/document management was fairly minimal on most of the tools. Many of these tools also lacked the ability to search or share context between files/documents. For example, if a note is written on one whiteboard, we might want to reference it in a different document. Again Notion was the exception.
We found Notion’s complexity and rich feature set made it harder to get into a flow state compared to the other tools, but it was the most organized of the bunch by far.
I knew we couldn’t have an organization structure like Miro, Notion or FigJam. However, our solution couldn’t be as complex as Notion’s database. I needed an intuitive solution that was satisfying to use.
While working on another project, I marked a task complete on our team kanban board. I felt a bit joy watching the card move in progress to review. At that moment, I realized this could be a potential solution. Kanban boards that feature card nesting have adavanced sorting, but aren’t difficult to understand like a database. I’ve never seen kanban board UIs used in file management, but they are prominent in task management. I needed data to back this up, but I felt writing ideas on kanban would feel as natural as writing a user story or task. I drafted a simple prototype for validation and later a sketch to visualize the UI.
I was under a time crunch because our pitch to Service Canada and our team schedule we needed to complete a design in under a week that met all their technical requirements. The team had to decide on trying to create a complete app design in a rush or focusing our efforts on specific features. After reviewing my kanban idea with our design team, dev team, and product owner, we decided to focus our attention on designing a high-fidelity mockup that featured a kanban UI.
A dotted background was used to highlight the app’s infinite canvas for work. We used floating UI panels to minimize visual clutter and bring user attention to the canvas.
Various display modes (edit, view, comment, share) adapt the UI to suit the needs of the users. Seamlessly hiding away unnecessary UI components and giving clarity to the user.
